wkk@houxj.UUCP (W.KAPLOW) (03/18/87)
With all the talk of hard-disks on the net, I figured it was time to check-out putting together my own hard-disk. I wanted to do it cheaply, and also wanted a little adventure in doing it. I borrowed a Tandon TM755 disk-drive from work. It is actually a very expensive drive, but my experience would not have changed if I used a cheaper one. This drive has 50 MB unformatted capacity, and 28 millisec average seek time (one hellava-lot better than a Seagate drive). I bought a 150 watt PC-AT power supply from a mail-order company for $79. I later found one for only $50. Next, I contacted Berkley Microsystems. They were very helpful and within a week after they recieved my check I received their boards. Using some screws and other hardware I "found", I bolted the two board, the BMS-100, and the Adaptek-4000 together. I placed a small peice of plywood on the top of the bolts and rested the disk on top of it. The menu-driven software from BMS is very easy to use, and I was formating the disk within minutes of powering-up the drive. The added benefit of this system is that the BMS board contains a battery backed-up clock, which so far seem to work great with software provided by BMS. Needless to say, I am very pleased with this system. I run the Beckmeyer MT-Cshell version 1.10 and it is very happy to be running from the hard-disk. As an aside, I originally boughtt MT-Cshell version 1.00. This the new version includes bug fixes for some most of the programs that had difficulty running under 1.0. This fix thankfully included a fix to a bug that caused an application I wrote not to work. Also, the update cost me $10.00 and took only 1.5 weeks to be delivered. I use the Megamax compiler ver 1.0. I am going to send for an update to version 1.1 (I think). I'll post a message about the fixes, improvements etc. AS always the views and oppinions expressed by me are my own, and only represent my neurons and not AT&T's or anyone else's who might yell at me. Wesley Kaplow AT&T Holmdel, NJ 07733 (201)949-0065